THE IMPACT OF POLICE INVESTIGATIONS ON POLICE-REPORTED RATES OF GANG AND NONGANG HOMICIDES*

This paper is concerned with the utility of police-reported rates of gang violence, particularly important in an era which stresses officially determined rates of violence. The basic question is whether police investigation procedures have a major impact on the police designations of homicides as gang related, a question of causal order answerable only by the triangulation provided by multiple forms of data analysis. With minor qualification, the results suggest that“gang” designations of homicides reject characteristics of the incident settings and participants, that intrusion of investigative processes on reported gang versus nongang homicide rates was minimal, and that gang homicide rates reported by these departments could be used as reasonable criteria for evaluating program impact.     

Recalling the Fall of the Berlin Wall

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the triumphant celebrations of the West, a new chapter of history has opened featuring the rising powers of Asia, led by China. Though embracing free markets, China has looked to its Confucian traditions instead of liberal democracy as the best route to good governance. Will China manage to achieve high growth and a harmonious society through a strong state and long‐range planning that puts messy Western democracy and its short‐term mindset to shame? Or, in the end, will the weak rule of law and absence of political accountability in a one‐party state undermine its promise? Francis Fukuyama and Kishore Mahbubani, the Singaporean thinker who has become the apostle of non‐Western modernity, debate these issues. In this section we also republish a collective memoir by George H.W. Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher and François Mitterrand, recalling their fears and hopes two decades ago as they brought the Cold War to an end.     

Regulation as the Mother of Innovation: The Case of SO2 Control*

This paper explores the relationship between government actions and innovation in an environmental control technology—sulfur dioxide (SO₂) control technologies for power plants—through the use of complementary research methods. Its findings include the importance of regulation and the anticipation of regulation in stimulating invention; the greater role of regulation, as opposed to public R&D expenditures, in inducing invention; the importance of regulatory stringency in determining technical pathways and stimulating collaboration; and the importance of regulatory‐driven technological diffusion in contributing to operating experience and post‐adoption innovation in cost and performance. A number of policy implications are drawn from this work.     

THE USE AND EFFECTS OF FINANCIAL PENALTIES IN MUNICIPAL COURTS

With prison, jail, and probation caseloads overloaded, financial penalties appeal as alternative sanctions. Using probation data for cases sentenced in municipal courts, this paper presents regression analyses suggesting that judges tended to employ rational discretion in imposing economic sanctions, for monetary assessments without jail were most likely to be given to low-risk offenders and assignment of probation alone and jail terms was most strongly influenced by offense. The amount of the financial sanction was also significantly related to the type of crime. Controlling for individual attributes and offense, the odds of subsequent arrest and incarceration were significantly less for those given a financial penalty than for those receiving a jail sentence.